This is a paper about the creativity of fear in film and philosophy,
focussing on Lars von Trier and Gilles Deleuze. The former is a film maker who
has a long history of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment for phobic
anxiety which he has used both critically and creatively as material for his
films. The latter, we discover from his biographer Francoise Dosse, had a phobia
for both milk products and schizophrenics. In this paper, the understanding of
phobia developed in the cinema of von Trier will be deployed in order to
disclose the link between a fear of milk and the figure of the schizophrenic and
offer a different way of understanding the dynamic genesis of Deleuze’s
philosophy, particularly his logic of sense. Neither exactly a structure nor a
symptom, phobia is a problematic category in psychoanalysis. Here,
psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of phobia are
discussed by way of elaborating a ‘gnomonology’ that articulates a critical and
clinical understanding of cultural production, particularly in its engagements
with scientific discourse.